Office Web Apps Now Live

Office Web Apps — Microsoft’s free online version of its Office suite — is now available to users in the U.S., the UK, Canada, and Ireland via Windows Skydrive. To try it out, just head to office.live.com (you’ll need a free Windows Live account).

Office Web Apps is pretty impressive, incorporating browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that look and feel very much like the desktop apps. They work in all modern browsers, and you don’t need to install Silverlight to use them, although some features work better with it installed. While the web apps don’t offer as much power and functionality as their desktop cousins, they’re at least on par with Google Docs, and if you have Office 2010 (which is being released to non-business customers next week) you’ll get seamless round-trip editing between the desktop and the cloud. (If you’re interested in learning more about cloud computing and how it enables web apps like this, check out our Structure conference in San Francisco later this month).